Geopolitics

[Husky]

[quote name='dhu' date='18 September 2011 - 10:34 AM' timestamp='1316321808' post='112910']

[url="http://news.taaza.com/source/6064-lakh-carat-diamond-reserves-in-chhattisgarh.html"]13 lakh carat diamond reserves in Chhattisgarh[/url][/quote]



And more goodies for pillaging:



1. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2011/07/m...adesh.html

Monday, July 18, 2011

Massive Uranium Find in Andhra Pradesh

One of the world's largest uranium deposits may have been found in Andhra Pradesh, according to an announcement by the Indian govt.

Posted by san at 7/18/2011 10:17:00 PM Labels: economy, energy, nuclear

2. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2011/09/t...dence.html

Friday, September 16, 2011

Thorium and India's energy independence: forbes. So far India has managed to screw up royally on fast-breeders, of course

sep 16th, 2011 CE



my suspicion is that there isn't enough money to be made (yet) in thorium reactors. as far as the politicians are concerned, it's a lot easier to make the big bucks via corruption in a) nuclear fission, b ) oil. therefore, being rational economic beings, they are not interested in thorium



---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Harish

Rajeev,







Thorium as the next energy source.. interesting article..



India has as you know, pretty much 2/3 of the world' deposits.. India's energy independence based on our resources

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentl...e-possibly





-harish



Posted by nizhal yoddha at 9/16/2011 07:22:00 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Reactions:

Christianisation of AP, and off the coast of India. Parallels christianisation of the population in other strategic (resource-rich) regions of the world. (E.g. Was it E-Timor that was rich in oil (sorry, can't remember... And then the missionaries of American christian cults crashing the catholic party in S America, wherever there were abundant natural resources that the US were interested in.)



Turning people into sheep - "giving them the babble in their hand and taking their land while they had their eyes closed to pray" as Africans noted - is an easy way to get sheep to give away to their christomasters whatever is requested.



Sheep are so stupid.

[sumishi]

[size="3"][url="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article2554499.ece"]The ‘Arab Spring’ and beyond[/url]: The Hindu, October 20, 2011



[/size][indent][size="3"][quote name="MADANJEET SINGH (founder of the South Asia Foundation)"][/size][size="3"][size="2"]

The Arab countries seem to be heading towards a scenario of struggle between fanatics and the more moderate sections of society. Here, a demonstration at the Tahrir Square in Cairo[/size]

---

[size="4"]The aborting of the 2011 revolutionary waves of protests has given the Anglo-Americans another opportunity to install Islamists in the Arab world.[/size]

---

The Arab Spring is a misnomer used by the media to describe the uprising that the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi unleashed in Tunisia on December 18, 2010 in protest against police corruption and ill-treatment — a spark that ignited into wildfire and spread to Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and to other countries. In January, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, the fountainhead of Islamic fundamentalism.



But it was in Egypt that the computer-literate working class youth and their supporters among middle-class college students, created a veritable revolution, fanned by the whirlwind of many human rights activists, labour, trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and especially unemployed youth. A Facebook page set up to promote the demonstrations, attracted tens of thousands of followers. The government mobilised the riot police and resorted to infiltration to break the uprising, but the demonstrations by students and labour activists continued in Tahrir Square, until President Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign on February 11, 2011, after 18 days of massive protests, ending his 30-year presidency.



The euphoria that chants such as “the people and the Army are united” that had reverberated around Egypt’s squares created, was rudely snuffed out within a week by the Egyptian military Generals, who grabbed power from President Hosni Mubarak. They did not identify themselves as partners in the revolution, but claimed to be the sole bearer of its legitimacy. The haste with which they discarded the façade of secularism that Mubarak’s authoritarian regime was using against the Muslim Brotherhood, resulted in the largest demonstration on Friday, July 29, by thousands of Islamists since the uprising, calling for the imposition of strict Shariah law. Many demonstrators carried Saudi Arabian flags and placards that said: ‘Bin Laden is in Tahrir.’ As recently as 2009, the Brotherhood had called for a ban on women or Christians serving as Egypt’s President.



Tahrir Square, once the scene of wild celebrations, turned into a battlefield as the Army moved in to disperse the activists, beating them with clubs and electric rods, and even firing live ammunition. Hundreds have since been thrown in jail and 12,000 civilians have been tried in military tribunals — a number that is far more than was treated thus during Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship. Widespread torture by beatings, electrocution, and even sexual assault by military personnel, has been reported. The police, in connivance with the authorities, have shot and killed Coptic Christians who protested against Islamists that had set fire to their churches. The Egyptian Coptic Patriarch, Chenouda III, was awarded the 2000 UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence for encouraging interfaith dialogue.



The Islamic retrogression is a far cry from the colourful secular flowers that had blossomed during the Arab Spring with the establishment of the Baath Party in 1946. “Baath,” which means "resurrection" or "renaissance," was a movement that was founded in Damascus by two Syrian intellectuals: Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian (1910-1989), and Salah al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim (1912-1980). In the early 1930s, Alfaq and Bitar had gone to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris and worked together to formulate a doctrine that combined aspects of Arab nationalism and socialism committed to Arab unity and the freedom of the Arab world from the clutches of Western colonialism.



On their return to Syria in the early 1940s, they became school teachers, and together with a significant number of Christian Arabs as founding members, they promoted Baathist ideology within a nationalist and secular political framework that rejected the faith-based orientation. These ideas of protecting the minority status of non-Muslims, found favour with the progressive leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement such as Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Tito in Yugoslavia and Sukarno in Indonesia, since the secular ideology helped them to stabilise the ethnic and communal conflicts in their newly independent countries. They also supported the Baathist concept of socialism that differed from classical Marxism.



These were among the reasons for Baathism having grown rapidly, establishing a number of branches in different Arab countries. Baathism went on to form governments in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Egypt briefly when Syria merged with Egypt in 1958, to become the United Arab Republic. There could not have been better interlocutors than Aflaq, representing the Greek civilisation, and Bitar, personifying the Phoenician culture. They conceived their respective religions as a mere appendix attached to the Greek and Phoenician classical antiquity that spread across the Mediterranean region from 1550 BC to 300 BC.



This region, known as the ‘Fertile Crescent,’ comprising ancient Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia, was home to the earliest urban communities in the world, spanning some 5000 years of history. It was in ancient Iraq that the first literate societies developed in the late 4th millennium BC. They developed the first cities and complex state bureaucracies, using a highly sophisticated writing system. Their scholars compiled historical, juridical, economical, mathematical, astronomical, lexical, grammatical and epistolary treatises. They invented the first two-wheeled wooden carts and built roads, earlier than 3000 BC. It was this cradle of civilisation that the illegal Anglo-American invasion destroyed. The invaders installed bin Laden’s jihadists to promote their Islamic agenda.



Taha Hussein (1889-1973) was the senior mentor of Aflaq and Bitar. He was one of the most influential 20th century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, known as the pioneer of the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. An admirer of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he was a nationalist, and his vision of Egyptian secular culture was embedded in what he called “Pharaonism.” He believed that “Egypt could only progress without reclaiming its ancient pre-Islamic roots.” He opposed Saudi Arabia’s Stone-Age Islamic culture of the desert that was alien to the rich Arab cultures of the Fertile Crescent.



Taha Hussein was prosecuted for his views and lived in exile for several years. It was not until the 1950s that he was rehabilitated, on the eve of Egypt becoming a republic, and appointed Minister of Knowledge (now the Ministry of Education). This gave him the opportunity to initiate a number of educational reforms, such as free education for children. Like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first Education Minister of independent India, Taha Hussein left no stone unturned to make education secular. He transformed many of the Koranic schools into secular primary schools and secularised not only the Al-Azhar but also a number of scientific universities that he established. He upgraded several high schools to colleges, such as the Graduate School of Medicine, Agriculture and others.



Since the United States’ alliance with bin Laden’s Mujahideen destroyed the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1989, and dismantled the secular Baath administrations in Iraq for the benefit of al-Qaeda jihadists, the abortion of the 2011 Arab Spring has given the Anglo-Americans another wonderful opportunity to install Islamists in the Arab world. These ferocious vultures are now hovering over Syria, the last bastion of Baathism, under the pretext of democracy, to tear apart the amity between its Muslim and Christian communities. But so far they have found no ruse to directly attack Syria, as President Bashar al-Assad could not be accused of “possessing weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying Western civilisations within 45 minutes.” So the Arab Spring has become the Trojan horse to supply arms and ammunition to the dissidents and escalate the conflict into an emergency to isolate Syria by imposing United Nations sanctions.



The computer-literate students and working class youths and their supporters among the middle class who had initiated the protests, are naturally baffled, as I was when India was partitioned by the British colonialists. The impact of the divide-and-rule policy was even more devastating on the subcontinent’s Sufi Islam as Pakistan’s military dictators uprooted it to cut the Gordian knot with Mother India’s secular and pluralist culture. The political scenario in the Arab countries seems to be heading towards one similar to the struggle now being waged in Pakistan between Muslim fanatics and the more moderate sections of society,



As with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Ennahda Party of the Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi is expected to win the elections in Tunisia next month and choose an Assembly to draft a new Constitution. His biographer Azzam Tamimi wrote: “The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout Muslim. It’s going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.” During a re¬cent debate with a secular critic, Ghannouchi asked: “If the Islamic spectrum goes from bin Laden to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which of them is Islam?” And he argued: “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models — models that combine Islam and mo¬dernity?”



Ghannouchi seems unaware of Prime Minister Erdogan’s antecedents. As Mayor of Istanbul in 1995, he declared that “the New Year’s Day is a Christian holiday and not a legitimate cause for celebration by Muslims,” and that “shaking hands with the opposite sex is prohibited by Islam.” In 1997, he identified Turkish society as having “two fundamentally different camps — the secularists who follow Kemal Atatürk’s reforms, and the Muslims who unite Islam with Shariah laws.” The secular lullaby he is singing to put his people to sleep and join the European Union, is symbolised by the Islamic hijab with which President Gul’s wife wraps her head.



Regarding Indonesia and Malaysia, Ghannouchi would have known better had he married an Indonesian Muslim — as I did in 1963 — and witnessed how the indigenous syncretistic cultures derived from the secular Buddhism and multicultural Hinduism are being systematically destroyed by the innumerable Wahabi mosques and fundamentalist madrasas that the Saudi petrodollars have built in these countries.



The omens are ominous as thousands of Islamists in Tunis have protested against the screening of a film they condemn as “un-Islamic and blasphemous.” And in Cairo, a student attending a Salafist protest meeting asked: “If democracy means majority, then why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities — the liber¬als and the secularists — when we Islamists are the major¬ity? Salafis are the extremists that espouse violent jihad against civilians as a legitimate expression of Islam.”



The Arab Springers seem well on their way towards subscribing to the Sunni majoritarian culture and becoming another “epicentre of terrorism” like Pakistan, where even the moderate civilians are throwing rose petals on the assassin of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who was assassinated for defending a Christian woman condemned to die for insulting Islam. The judge of the Anti-Terrorism Court who sentenced Mumtaz Qadri to death has gone into hiding after lawyers attacked his courtroom, and a spate of protests and death threats. Banner-carrying mobs in Lahore, Rawalpindi and other cities are “saluting Qadiri’s glory,” and some fundamentalist organisations have announced huge rewards for anyone who would kill the judge.



“Pakistan once had a violent, rabidly religious lunatic fringe. This fringe has morphed into a majority. The liberals are now the fringe. We are now a nation of butchers and primitive savages. Europe’s Dark Ages have descended upon us,” said Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

[/quote]

[/size][/indent]

[dhu]

[size="3"]Sumishi, friends,

What is the rationale behind colonizer "showing its hand" in so many color revolutions..

Unlike just a few years ago, it is not difficult now to find articles exposing the imperialist designs behind all the various liberation movements.

There are certain western elements which have decided that "blowback" is the cause of loss of their patrimony and they are forcing the colonizer's hand by exposing the game

However what is consistently missing is an analysis of the Christist role in slave/sepoy creation: that is, the analysis never rises to the level of Sandhya Jain or Avro Manhattan...



Here is an article by yet another expose site, Truthout (it takes considerable effort to create these sites, youtube videos of impeccable professional quality, and so on... Which is way beyond the capacity of the unorganized "rebels"



[/size]

[size="3"][url="http://truth-out.org/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-about-banking/1302678000"]Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?[/url]

by: Ellen Brown, truthout

A line of rebel trucks wait at the western entrance to Ajdabiya, Libya, on April 11, 2011. (Photo: Bryan Denton / The New York Times)



Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:



[color="#000080"] I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.[/color]



Alex Newman wrote in the New American:



[color="#000080"] In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the "[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi."[/color]



Newman quoted CNBC Senior Editor John Carney, who asked, "Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."



Another anomaly involves the official justification for taking up arms against Libya. Supposedly it's about human rights violations, but the evidence is contradictory. According to an article on the Fox News web site on February 28:



[color="#000080"]As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya's human rights record.



The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens - who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.

[/color]

Whatever might be said of Qaddafi's personal crimes, the Libyan people seem to be thriving. A delegation of medical professionals from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus wrote in an appeal to Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin that after becoming acquainted with Libyan life, it was their view that in few nations did people live in such comfort:



[color="#000080"] [Libyans] are entitled to free treatment and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink and are very religious.[/color]



They maintained that the international community had been misinformed about the struggle against the regime. "Tell us," they said, "who would not like such a regime?"



Even if that is just propaganda, there is no denying at least one very popular achievement of the Libyan government: it brought water to the desert by building the largest and most expensive irrigation project in history, the $33 billion GMMR (Great Man-Made River) project. Even more than oil, water is crucial to life in Libya. The GMMR provides 70 percent of the population with water for drinking and irrigation, pumping it from Libya's vast underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas 4,000 kilometers to the north. The Libyan government has done at least some things right.



Another explanation for the assault on Libya is that it is "all about oil," but that theory, too, is problematic. As noted in the National Journal, the country produces only about 2 percent of the world's oil. Saudi Arabia alone has enough spare capacity to make up for any lost production if Libyan oil were to disappear from the market. And if it's all about oil, why the rush to set up a new central bank?



Another provocative bit of data circulating on the net is a 2007 Democracy Now! interview of US Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.). In it he says that about ten days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Clark was surprised and asked why. "I don't know!" was the response. "I guess they don't know what else to do!" Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.



What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.



The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted, "[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency and its dominion as the petrodollar."



According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Lybia - Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar," Qaddaffi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Qaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.



As right-wing attacks on our basic rights and services are growing louder than ever, it's essential to keep independent journalism strong. Support Truthout by clicking here.



And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:



[color="#000080"] One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned.... Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.[/color]



Libya not only has oil. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold, in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?



All of which prompts a closer look at the BIS rules and their effect on local economies. An article on the BIS web site states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network are supposed to have as their single or primary objective "to preserve price stability." They are to be kept independent from government to make sure that political considerations don't interfere with this mandate. "Price stability" means maintaining a stable money supply, even if that means burdening the people with heavy foreign debts. Central banks are discouraged from increasing the money supply by printing money and using it for the benefit of the state, either directly or as loans.



In a 2002 article in Asia Times titled "The BIS vs National Banks," Henry Liu maintained:



[color="#000080"]BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests.



... FDI [foreign direct investment] denominated in foreign currencies, mostly dollars, has condemned many national economies into unbalanced development toward export, merely to make dollar-denominated interest payments to FDI, with little net benefit to the domestic economies.[/color]



He added, "Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation." The "state theory of money" refers to money created by governments rather than private banks.



The presumption of the rule against borrowing from the government's own central bank is that this will be inflationary, while borrowing existing money from foreign banks or the IMF will not. But all banks actually create the money they lend on their books, whether publicly owned or privately owned. Most new money today comes from bank loans. Borrowing it from the government's own central bank has the advantage that the loan is effectively interest free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by an average of 50 percent.



And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include "issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya" and "managing and issuing all state loans." Libya's wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.



That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the GMMR project. Libyans are worried that NATO-led airstrikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.



So, is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both - and water as well. With energy, water and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible. Most countries don't have oil, but new technologies are being developed that could make non-oil-producing nations energy independent, particularly if infrastructure costs are halved by borrowing from the nation's own publicly-owned bank. Energy independence would free governments from the web of the international bankers and of the need to shift production from domestic to foreign markets to service the loans.



If the Qaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors and whether education and health care continue to be free.

Creative Commons License



Ellen is an attorney and the author of eleven books, including Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com.

[/size]

[sumishi]

[quote name='dhu' date='22 October 2011 - 04:07 AM' timestamp='1319236182' post='113423']

[size="3"]Sumishi, friends,

What is the rationale behind colonizer "showing its hand" in so many color revolutions..

Unlike just a few years ago, it is not difficult now to find articles exposing the imperialist designs behind all the various liberation movements.

There are certain western elements which have decided that "blowback" is the cause of loss of their patrimony and they are forcing the colonizer's hand by exposing the game

However what is consistently missing is an analysis of the Christist role in slave/sepoy creation: that is, the analysis never rises to the level of Sandhya Jain or Avro Manhattan...



Here is an article by yet another expose site, Truthout (it takes considerable effort to create these sites, youtube videos of impeccable professional quality, and so on... Which is way beyond the capacity of the unorganized "rebels"



[/size]

[size="3"][url="http://truth-out.org/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-about-banking/1302678000"]Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?[/url]

by: Ellen Brown, truthout

...

[/size]

[/quote]



[size="3"]Excellent question! But do I have an answer, I don't know. But I can speculate.



IMO, the Internet in the past few years has led to an explosion of alternative viewpoints, which took off after reaching a certain critical mass. Here is an excerpt from a thought-provoking article [url="http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/28/minority-rules-why-10-percent-is-all-you-need/"]Minority Rules: Why 10 Percent is All You Need[/url]:



[/size][indent][size="3"]

What does it take for an idea to spread from one to many? For a minority opinion to become the majority belief? According to a new study by scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the answer is 10%. Once 10% of a population is committed to an idea, it’s inevitable that it will eventually become the prevailing opinion of the entire group. The key is to remain committed.

[/size]

[/indent][size="3"]So is it a case of a takeoff after critical mass?



Another opinion of mine is based on an analogy. You hear intermittent "crick...crick," at the edge of hearing, from you door at night, and finally you get a viewpoint from one of your very knowledgeable friends that termites are eating away the door (you never knew about the termites yourself earlier). You investigate, and a layer of door peels off to show how the insects have destroyed the door from within, and are still busy at it. Its in their nature. The difference with the real world global "termites," "coloniser" if you will, is that they are intelligent, and even it their hand is exposed, they have the hubris and arrogance to forge ahead with nary a care [/size][size="3"] [/size][size="3"], for they effectively are in charge of geopolitics.



Meanwhile, the rise in global consciousness on the presence of the hidden hand of the global banking-military-industrial-pharma complex is exponentially increasing. Mainstream media is rapidly losing its credibility.[/size] <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/dry.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='<_<' />

[dhu]

[size="3"][url="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15936276"]Norway massacre: Breivik declared insane[/url][/size]



Norwegian prosecutor Svein Holden: "The observed person was psychotic"

[Arun_S]

[url="http://www.samachar.com/India-in-2012-Strategic-and-security-challenges-beckon-mbdjKlgjaeb.html?source=recommended_news"]India in 2012: Strategic and security challenges beckon[/url]

January 03, 2012 08:57 IST [size="2"] The greatest challenge to India [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=india"][/url]is that its political class seems oblivious to the challenges of the big picture and national security does not receive the attention it warrants in Parliament, points out Commodore C Uday Bhaskar (retd).



[size="5"]F[/size]or India, the year that has dawned will have to address a complex set of security and related strategic challenges. Appropriate lessons will have to be astutely gleaned from the tainted year that has ended which has been one of great contrast for India.



A series of scandals involving high-profile public figures had rocked the country over the last six months and December witnessed the Indian political establishment in great tumult, even as Parliament remained locked in a bitter, arid, struggle over the issue of corruption and the most appropriate way of dealing with it, as symbolised by the ruckus over the Lokpal Bill.



The last sitting in the Rajya Sabha reveled in cynical legislative obfuscation and at year-end, Indian democracy was diminished.



Yet 2011 began with India being hailed as an island of political and economic stability even while other nations and regions were in ferment -- from the Arab Spring to fiscal convulsions in Europe, turbulence in the Af-Pak region and Iran and the growing social unrest in China.



However, notwithstanding the current domestic political contestation between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=bharatiya+janata+party"]Images[/url] ], it may be reasonable to suggest that India's political stability is not in dire danger -- this government is unlikely to be toppled in a hurry -- though the ignominy of poor and corruption-tainted governance will be a cross that the United Progressive Alliance [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=united+progressive+alliance"]Images[/url] ] II will have to bear till the next general election in 2014.



Paradoxically the big picture about India remains positive and a CEBR report released in London [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=london"]Images[/url] ] on December 26 indicates that the upward economic trajectory of the country will continue and that by 2020, India will be the world's fifth largest global economy. The four nations ahead of India are projected to be the USA, China, Japan [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=japan"]Images[/url] ] and Russia [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=russia"]Images[/url] ] in that order.



In 2011, India's GDP is estimated to be $1.843 trillion and by 2020, this will move up to $4.5 trillion -- in other words India will be two-and-a-half times more prosperous.



The challenge will be to ensure that this growth is equitable and inclusive -- an objective that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=manmohan+singh"]Images[/url] ] has always identified -- but whose realisation remains elusive.



In the intervening period, India will have to deal with complex security and strategic challenges and these may be classified at three levels. The most visible is the domestic context wherein one strand -- referred to as the Maoist or left-wing-extremism, is to my mind the most serious challenge to internal security.



This is directly linked to the poor and inadequate development effort and as India grows richer -- the gap between the haves and have-nots is bound to increase. This in turn will lead to a growing underclass of millions who remain unemployed and impoverished, thereby generating a tsunami of deprivation driven anger with the potential for pockets of intense sectarian and class violence.



The related threat to internal security is the variation of the Mumbai [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=mumbai"]Images[/url] ] 26/11 kind of terror attack and this is linked to the external regional dimension. Since 1990 Pakistan has been stoking and spreading the fervour of distorted Islamic ideology through groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=lashkar-e-tayiba"]Images[/url] ] and the Jaish-e-Mohammed to wage a proxy war against India and inciting disgruntled elements within India to join this effort.



The scope of this challenge remains dormant, but will be shaped by events within Pakistan and Afghanistan even as the US withdrawal date in 2014 draws closer.



Current developments in this region are bleak and the projection for 2012 pessimistic, given the ongoing tussle between the military and the civilian leadership in Pakistan on one hand, and the Hamid Karzai [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=hamid+karzai"]Images[/url] ] government's inability to deal with the multiple challenges in Afghanistan.



The right-wing Islamic constituency that supports the ideology of the Taliban [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=taliban"]Images[/url] ] and Wahabbi Islam is spread in pockets throughout the South Asian region and apart from Pakistan and Bangladesh, the most recent example of this occurrence is in distant Maldives [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=maldives"]Images[/url] ].



This challenge will remain abiding for India for a decade -- if not longer -- and has to be addressed with the right combination of political and socio-economic initiatives complemented by security and intelligence effort. The post Mumbai 26/11 security preparedness audit would indicate that India has not learnt the right lessons from its long drawn terror experience.



At the strategic level the principal challenge for India will be the 'rise' of China. Over the next decade, both Asian giants are poised to grow in prosperity -- though China is growing more rapidly. By 2020, China's GDP is estimated to be $17.88 trillion -- and will be almost four times more prosperous with a slightly lower population base that will be ageing.



History tells us that when a nation becomes richer, it is able to spend more on its defence and military profile -- and China is no different.



While India's defence expenditure is currently in the range of $40 billion -- that of China is almost three to four times larger and the military gap is increasing in China's favour. It is instructive that the Sino-Indian bilateral relationship is characterised by what may be described as strategic restraint, but tactical provocation. The unresolved territorial and border dispute which triggered the October 1962 war will soon be 50 years old and a contradictory pattern is emerging.



China will soon be India's largest trading partner and the inter-dependency on the economic front will become more robust -- unless Beijing [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=beijing"]Images[/url] ] decides to embark upon a very rash and impulsive anti-India initiative. While the top political leadership in Beijing has been cautious till now -- the transition in the Chinese leadership in 2012 will have to be managed prudently by both sides.



The related strategic link is the manner in which Delhi [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=delhi"]Images[/url] ] defines and manages its relations with Washington and Moscow [ [url="http://search.rediff.com/imgsrch/default.php?MT=moscow"]Images[/url] ] as far as its holistic military profile is concerned. It is a matter of shame and vulnerability that India is the world's leading importer of military inventory and has a negligible domestic design and production capability.



Perhaps the greatest challenge to India is that its political class seems oblivious to the contours and challenges of the big picture and national security does not receive the objective and constructive attention it warrants in Parliament.



[/size][size="2"]Is there slender hope that this will be redressed in 2012?[/size]



C Uday Bhaskar

[Guest]

"Translated from JSS News:

According to Arab media www.eltira.org , Bashar al-Assad would have been seriously wounded by gunfire last night Saturday, March 23 by his bodyguard but Iran is not dead. He is currently hospitalized, between life and death, Shami Hospital in Damascus which the streets were closed."



Israeli news reporting him as dead



If Assad is dead — a big if at this point — then we may yet see another step toward the Caliphate succeed.